Josh Duhamel isn’t going to be caught off guard if and when a societal collapse occurs and the “Transformers” star has taken measures to protect himself and his family if the “sh*t hits the fan” in Los Angeles, a crime-ridden dystopian hellhole under even the best of circumstances.
“I’ve become a bit of a doomsday prepper, I guess,” the 50-year-old movie and television actor said in an interview with the website Inverse where he talked about the 54 acres of land that he owns in North Dakota described as a “lakeside compound where the actor believes he could survive indefinitely — if it came to that,” a wise precaution in uncertain times of social deterioration, economic uncertainty, war, disease, and political instability.
“I’m learning how to hunt. I fish,” he said. “I’m building something so if things do go south, I have a place to take my family.”
“It started with one little cabin in the woods with no electricity and no water. We would go and we didn’t wanna stay for more than a day or two. You could tell the mice had overrun it. It was disgusting,” he added. “Then, the cabin on the property next to that one went up for sale, and I bought it for like nothing; this beautiful little idyllic cabin on the water. Suddenly I had 54 acres out there. So I had two cabins, one with no electricity or water. They both have wells and electricity now, but they’re both really small.”
“We shaped the land. We created trails through it. I’m actually growing crops out there,” Duhamel said of the property which now has a water filtration system, plumbing, and TV thanks to the internet from Elon Musk’s Starlink.
(Image: Screengrab/Instagram)
He told the outlet that this year he plans to grow corn and pumpkins and that he plans on learning to hunt for food if necessary.
“I want to be able to hunt a deer. I’m not a hunter by any means, but I have this crazy fixation on what happens if sh*t hits the fan in LA and I have to take my family out there and live off the land,” he said. “I’ve become a bit of a doomsday prepper, I guess. So I’m learning how to hunt. I have wells. We have water. We have fuel. I’m building something so if things do go south, I have a place to take my family. And I believe that we could live off the land out there. I’m not very good at it yet, but I’m getting there.”
“It keeps my lizard brain active,” Duhamel added.
(Image: Screengrab/Instagram)
The “Buddy Games” star credits the book “Patriots: Surviving the Coming Collapse,” which he read years ago as freaking him out “a little bit” and spurring him to pursue setting up a refuge if all hell breaks loose in L.A.
“And then there was a movie or book about these guys who had this little community where everybody had their own specialty. One was weapons, one was canning, one was construction, one was medical. And if you didn’t have something to bring to the group, you were out. I’m not saying I’m that crazy about it, but it is a comforting feeling knowing that I could survive out there,” he said.
The property now has an independent water supply with three wells and the custom filtration system, plumbing, and two outhouses “just for nostalgic reasons, I guess,” he told the website.
“We recently got actual plumbing with actual flushing toilets,” he said. “For the first 10 years, it was outhouses, which my wife did not love; to go outside in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, especially when there’s wolves and bear all over the place out there.”
(Image: Screengrab/Instagram)
“We’re so deep in the woods that, especially in the winter, if you run out of any of these things and you get snowed in, you’re suddenly Jack Nicholson in The Shining,” Duhamel told the outlet, saying that he and his family could live by just fishing but would eventually need fuel and supplies.
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